Some social networks allow individuals to submit posts without identifying recipient users that should receive the posts. Instead, the social network distributes the posts to users that subscribe to the authors of the posts. Thus, a social network user may view a content stream of posts that have been authored by other users (which may be people, aliases or pen names, or organizations) to which the user subscribes. The posts in the content stream may be arranged chronologically or based on determined relevance to the viewing user.
The posts that are transmitted via the social network may be entirely textual, or may include multimedia content (e.g., images or videos). In some instances, the posts may include a Universal Resource Locator (URL), and such posts may be automatically populated with content that is selected from a website that is identified by the URL.